An Agreement
by Shanindar87
Summary: On a mission to free hostages in a xenophobic world, Star Fleet operatives become captured.


An Agreement (C)2018

 **Reiker asked Piccard "what are we watching?" Beverly says "it's that Tilak thing, what ever that is" ,**

 **Date says "Tilak, hair, the ancient earth musical transmitted in deep space by a vijar class probe from the 21st century point of origin, recently gathered from a deep range prauva class scouting vessel from Ralmos eight.**

 **Yes, Will adds, now it is on Remiul har Vartak, the Romulan Interstellar Network. So this immature rubbish is a big deal on Romulus prime.**

 **What was it crewman Yanna said of this thing, Piccard adds, that it is good intentioned but from another world and another time.**

 **What the empire needs is more mutual accommodations among its peoples and real restructuring, a hard look into the mirror of truth, as Tor put it.**

 **Enuf of this crap, let's play some poker- you said it, Rolaren.**

 **Piccard does a funny routine done by an earth comic in the 20th century. This is really amazing dope...did you really strip those floorboards yourself. it's funny to everybody. It is good nobody is really smoking weed.**

 **It is Vohl Sat from near the neutral zone.**

 **Piccard gets it in his ready room. She is at Athena four outpost and explains things in detail. x**

 **In my Ready room, now, all of you, and you too, Gainan, we need your insight on the matter.**

 **Piccard starts... You know how On Gainan's world, and Warf's, things went from**

 **an entity of tribal, to that of a global, politically, socially and in all respects in a matter of centuries, hers, around the time of Homer, his, Chaucer. How the Liamur originated, as**

 **a subspecies of Gainan's race, dwellers of a great expanse**

 **of coniferous forest, taiga, muskeg, trading with the greater population to which Gainan belongs, who were coastal dweller, mariners, city dwellers, who forged this unity among**

 **many ancient peoples her world. Gainan you want to add anything?**

 **\- I do... in the new order many of these wood dwellers or Liamur as they were called wound**

 **up as the urban underclass, and a social solution of resettling them on the mining colonies of Iama, my home worlds large moon.**

 **` Only years after this resettlement, a small fleet of Romulan privateers raided some of the lunar settlements and in time**

 **a very strange satrap was breeding them with some betazed subjects, and the liamur as we know them came to be.**

 **the Liamur followed an existence as trackers scouts and merchant carriers in several satrap entities where they lead an existence unsettled to any planet, and they have evolved a law among themselves. They have also developed**

 **a minimal tactical "poacher" class**

 **cruiser and serve in the fleets of numerous satraps of as many factions, and, in the past also the Klingons. These poachers are minimal**

 **tactical but have very sophisticated cloaking and tracking capabilities, and, each is a separate political entity in itself.**

 **The Liamur have no sense of borders, and their vessels have been detected in several surrounding quadrants in the last ten years, they have been compared in a sense to ancient earths "gypsies, "of its medieval Europe.**

 **Like them they have a strong communal sense, loyalty, and distrust of outsiders, but they see betazeds, and my people, as kindred souls.**

 **-And for this reason, Deana, and you, Gainan, shall be of great importance**

 **in gaining their trust, Piccard so brings an added point to Gainan's requested dissertation. Piccard has more to say but he has Vohl Sat on the viewer say it. She tells the members at the staff briefing: This is the nature of the mission for the task force. A poacher in**

 **x**

 **service to the detent located the Tilak theater Troop, as conformed, their foolish assumption that the Sith Ong would welcome them as many worlds within the all-empire congress would, poses, with many of the troop being members of some very influential families to the peace faction, a**

 **serious threat to the future of the detent and Tor's goals are in the future of these young lives once they do some growing up.**

 **The Sith Ong are ruthless to trespassers,**

 **they are very different from the Klingon privateers who once governed their world with the district councils before the war of independence and their emergence into a stellar state, and, the motive leading to the hostilities? The introduction of the extended family, the clan.**

 **this disrupted their social order until the emergence of their world council, elected by the totems and serving as a sort of**

 **supreme court of arbitrations, and a ruling junta, similar to ancient Earth's past.**

 **The totemic society is the very core of their social order, the nuclear family is a short-lived entity expressly for the purpose of the**

 **rearing of children, when the last child reaches the twelfth birthday, he or she joins a totemic society of choice, and the parents return to**

 **their own one, and the district reallots the homestead to another nuclear breeding family.**

 **The district is the local base of arbitration, industry, while the totemic societies and their lands comprising the districts are the core of their culture, one combining what is comparable to**

 **early twenty second Earth technology with an ancient hunter gatherer tradition. As with the Liamur forbearers who lived in the forest**

 **and later became Anghosia's urban underclass, and numerous such scenarios in earths past, it proved a painful, dehumanizing experience, a source of social disruption, and of resentment, distrust**

 **to the outside world. Distrust of the outside world is something the Sith Ong and Liamur hold in common. It is as much the help rendered by the Liamur as was the respect the Klingon overlords had for these Sith Ong subjects in rebellion that won their independence, and the Liamur are our hope**

 **for first contact with the Sith Ong.**

 **There is a map on the viewer and Piccard explains:**

 **At the task Force's use will be two poachers, but**

 **they are stationed at the stargate, beyond the Sith Ong Star system's outer world's moon,**

 **Chebei, we hope to land in this location, in the muskeg bog, here, just outside**

 **this settlement, where they are being held, by the Swamp-Snake totem. The fear is**

 **of their handing the captives over to the high council for execution, as a form of prestige leverage in a claim against the**

 **local Cedar-Thrush totem, with whom they are involved in a land and water rights dispute...**

 **The Poacher Class Warship is alien and sophisticated and wondrously simplistic and masterfully self-correcting, all at the same time. Yet it is**

 **such an improvised arrangement of Romulan, Klingon, and Khaldean salvage and replication, and with the semi domesticated vermin of many worlds crawling and scampering through its every part**

 **and with the low cabin temperature, with a characteristic combination of sloppiness complimented with an instant ability to jump into readiness, it reminds Laforge of his familiarization**

 **with pherenge scenarios, part of his training as a candidate for chief of engineering, at star base, five years before.**

 **Code 7048, a long researched procedure of the sabotage of a planetary monitoring satellite, from within a few central transfer crystals, to resemble the characteristic syndrome of inactivity. In a routine drill**

 **it is repaired in three hours, but, they have already entered the point of destination, in the totemic societies muskeg lodge banks.**

 **The better part of the Liamur command chose to lead the landing, Warf was left second in command of the poacher, cloaked and "beached" on The Sith Ong small outer moon. Everyone was out hunting or gathering except a few who were very old, or the little children born on**

 **totemic land, (of women at the end of childbearing ,known locally as "tliatima"-"just one more, kid", it is why in child rearing years,**

 **a man and woman are segregated from totemic society, a way of pressuring them to not exceed the limit of three children, beyond which is titim liapanam,**

 **the threat to all the precious delicate, the natural order, which the Klingons a century and a half before threatened with their concept of tschiakpur-the clan system.**

 **The Liamur barter, Laforge supervises with O'Brien their crews,**

 **and work the bulk- transport of this task force to the surface of Chibei.**

 **The strike force is beamed down in small scattered groups to avoid the detection of the sector surveillance systems, which are starting to come back on line.**

 **Just like that there is a telepathic link between a mousak leading one of away teams and Magiul, who is unknown save that she is telepathic, Sith Ong and knows these intruders are in her world. Soon everything is known, that there are strangers on Sith Ong.**

 **In the great hall, in the first city, Satrap Tilovan, Piccard, and the other members of the Task force, ( also called strike force, away team) stand in the docket, it reminds crewwoman Yanna of an ancient**

 **earth town hall or rural court house of ancient united states. The benches are full with spectators, a dwarf, of their race, stands near the box, acting as Sargent of arms.**

 **Straight ahead, on a platform, a great bench, aside from it, a scribe at his desk. Above the bench the portrait of general Pellekrinasch, the liberator of this world.**

 **The scores of conversations are muffled suddenly, Piccard, Narmun, Deana, others, turn.**

 **The drum, in the hands of an old male who looks like he could be first American except**

 **he is Sith Ong, in front of him a chubby boy who could pass for Mesoamerican if he was human, looking about eight in earth years, holding the flag**

 **of his monostellar world, in the center, the image of the liberator, with pointed hat, robes, to the left of it, the sacred cured roots of the trees symbolizing the totemic societies of their world. To the right, the bars of olive and green, symbolizing the districts, the embodiment of the do it your self ability to solve conflicts and work together on a local**

 **level.**

 **The emotional focus is very intense, it is an deeply felt yet understated ceremony. Behind them, the "maidens of honor" singing a chant. It reminds Piccard of the pacific northwest, of ancient earth. Then there is the**

 **ruling council behind everyone in the procession. The Magiul, The electron in his forties and four older men and women, one Old man looks Caucasian,**

 **one woman also, one woman looks native American and the other man looks**

 **black but they are Sith Ong.**

 **Their ceremonial robes of office are like clansmen**

 **robes of ancient earths past but they are made of fur. The electron looks briefly, at Warf, without expression. They are seated, The electron in the center.**

 **What has happened? The electron asks. He is told by the clerk**

 **"trespassers, beaming down on our world disrupting planetary security surveillance**

 **and they were detected in the black out the way caused by a holy woman on her totemic lands. She entered the mind of one of their telepaths and six of our hoarder adder battle cruisers have the two trespassing craft at bay and have prevented three trespassers from beaming back**

 **to their ships."**

 **the clerk hands each councilor a data board, with it each councilor reviews**

 **the deliberatura and they sign to one of the woman councilors who talks to the electrons as she is nearest to him, what she said can not be heard throughout the hall so the electron poses the questions formed by the other councilors and**

 **this is the way several totemic disputes are settled, and a district president urged to settle one of a minor nature with his council and totemic elders. An introverted child is urged to ponder more**

 **earnestly the totem of adoption, having but three birthdays to go. Some local children are criticized for teasing the introverted child. and a remedy for**

 **the situation posed to the elders of the totemic societies of all involved parents.**

 **Then they get to the matter of the trespassers in the cage.**

 **Data translates from English**

 **to Sith Ong and back into English. The satrap is asked for what reason he has trespassed their world, he gives an account of the folly of the tilak troop with best intentions**

 **and ignorance, the nature of the slow maturation of the Romulan psyche, their importance to and the nature of the succession and the detent, the role**

 **it plays in the balance of power in this part of the galaxy, also Piccard is asked "janulupika, lano ikoalin haiyan moropada?" a question of the electron's choosing,**

 **what would Piccard do if any of his people were caught pillaging the sacred silvine dumping grounds. (it is believed part of a living entity**

 **passes on in a possession, a shoe, a mattress, a watering bucket. The**

 **totemic woods is the resting place, the happy grounds of repose and gathering, and, as domesticated animals are seen as closely kindred, they are not**

 **slaughtered, but, as any other, placed in a " house of final rest", on their designates totemic grounds, (animals, have theirs as well, but the**

 **process of determination as to what totem an animal belongs to is unknown to outsiders.) The bodies of the dead both of the Sith and their animals are left for wild creatures to live on as it that which they are entitled to for wild animals, which the Sith Ong hunt are after**

 **all the agents to the afterlife.**

 **Piccard says "I would see to the immediate return of any of your worlds indigenous artifacts, and into immediate disciplinary actions.**

 **It is then that the woman who had the link with the away teams walks up from the spectators**

 **escorted by the Sargent of arms. She looks at the Magiul and raises her left hand then puts it down to her side.**

 **The first city is on a peninsula about a square kilometer in area. It is defined by two equal sized coves, on lake Tillanomann.**

 **The lake is the size of lake superior, hundreds of small bog streams feed into it and it is a very shallow but large lake,**

 **save for a central underwater rift making that long, slender sliver of the lake deep, like Lake Baykal. The first city is a lattice of times, places, suggestive of the StoneHenge Port aux Choixe or Lance a Mourt, or the ancient new saint Albans**

 **colony of the mid twenty first, in its best of accomplishments.**

 **The great hall is only hundreds of feet in length and transects the better part of**

 **the cluster of new and old buildings that is the first city. It is ringed with a silvine belt.**

 **The great hall is a great stone and log structure. It is ancient and fitted with**

 **the modern technologies the star faring privateers of this world introduced tempered with their own ingenuity. Ancient fixture like woodfire and electric**

 **heating coils make large quantities of the indigenous "coffee" and "tea", and a few "toddies".**

 **There are decay generators that turn organic refuse into energy and Geordie thinks its all pretty neat.. With all This Geordie now knows trespassers can be thrown into Tillanomenn falls.**

 **He can hear the falls rumble from where he stands near the great hall. They are powerful like Niagra and tall like Kissengani falls. Ro and Keisi walk out the door over to him. Ro says "This is all about their totem**

 **system and fear of having a clan system imposed on them by outsiders, and I being Bejoran and Keisi being**

 **Klingon...Ro is nervous and smokes a cigarette she had replicated.**

 **Piccard was with the Magiul and the electron and the holy woman was with them too.**

 **"The catastrophic damage their alien ways": I overheard an old Sith woman who works**

 **in the great kitchen say something to that effect": Ro continues... Geordie and Keisi both say "Ro Laren," Keisi says relax, woman, Jean Luc will find a way out of this mess. "**

 **Beverly is with Narmun, they have both faced the possibility of death before and think about**

 **the harm to the collective Sith psyche when Klingon administrators when they governed this world tried to replace the totem system with the clan system. We must seem like monsters, agents**

 **of neocolonialism to them, Beverly says out of the blue.**

 **Narmun points out an old Sith Ong man in a dark broad brimmed hat, baggy dark suit with a ribbon tie in bare feet. Mijan shows up**

 **and says "He got big feet"... Narmun says "he knows he looks funny and he is good with it.**

 **Some Sith women he knows think he's funny looking. It doesn't bother him,**

 **with his burrs and scent of resin on him"**

 **A black Vulcan male approaches Ro and Keisi, he is in Sith Ong clothing.**

 **He says "I am the minister of external world relations, everyone go inside please." So do we live or die, Ro asks, Piccard gathers his people into one group ans says "Now they want us to get drunk". Two glasses of Charang is the limit, put on a show**

 **but mind your manners." Ro says "Charang, the only thing Klingon this world held on to, that and disruptors"...**

 **Two hours later Pintek bartered for their release.**

 **Nothing was given for their release materially or monetarily. The holy woman who caught them deemed these intruders honorable, all they wanted were the Tilak kids from Romulus. And,**

 **Piccard's services in mediating**

 **between the cedar and swamp totems, at a wooden long house in the canoe district.**

 **And that is what this Tilak thing was all about, the Sith Ong wanted to check out this Piccard and his people and see what they are made of.**

 **anonymous**


End file.
